


Silk Hiding Steel

by takethembystorm



Series: Tea Break [46]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Biphobia, F/F, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Light Angst, this took unreasonably long to write
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-09-13 05:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 17,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9109255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/takethembystorm/pseuds/takethembystorm
Summary: Juleka's heard that good things come to those who wait.  Frankly, she's not having any of it.





	1. Baby Steps

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://sabertoothwalrus.tumblr.com/post/149725392857/handsomefuckingjack-this-really-effeminate-lady). Many thanks to [miraculousturtle](miraculousturtle.tumblr.com), without whose advice I would be up a creek with this story, to [clairelutra](clairelutra.tumblr.com), whose help delivered most of the characterization in this, and to [larvesta](larvesta.tumblr.com), whose guidance and judgment was invaluable in keeping this from being a complete shitshow.

“Thank you very much, have a good day,” she says.

As the woman collects her purchases and receipt and turns to go, Juleka lets her professionally friendly smile slip into a more neutral expression, her eyes losing their attentive focus and going glazed and distant.

An hour and forty minutes.  An hour and forty minutes to go until her shift is over and she can finally freaking go home.  An hour. And forty minutes.

She lets herself daydream for a little while about that beautiful little inevitability until the clacking footsteps of another customer’s arrival forces the well-used smile back on her face for the two minutes that it takes her to ring up the woman’s purchases, bag them, and send her on her way with a cheery “have a good day!”

She manages to make it through the next hour and thirty minutes without her brain turning into a beige-colored pudding, mostly by falling back on her old habit of mentally inventing backstories for the women (mostly on the younger end of middle-aged) and the occasional man (mostly trying to not make too much eye contact) that step up to her at her register.

A tall Algerian woman in a goldenrod yellow sundress with a perpetual smirk slanting across her face is probably a supermodel, spending some of her cash on a nice shiny designer bag to go with her nice shiny designer sunglasses and nice shiny designer choker.  A short, stout, middle-aged Frenchwoman, her pale face seamed with the beginnings of wrinkles hands over a gift card and a rewards card and is in all probability a cubicle worker and mother of three with a doting husband whom she probably thinks works too hard; she probably wouldn’t do this normally but she’s getting on in years and is close to her midlife crisis and wants to treat herself. To a quiet boy younger than she is who refuses to make eye contact as he pays for a mishmash of beauty products with a fistful of rumpled bills, she scribbles a quick note on his receipt—her email, her name, and “I can help”—and offers him an encouraging smile as he stares at her, wide-eyed—well, she’s best off not prying for now, she thinks as he scurries away.  A squat, stout man with a receding and silvering hairline, constantly wringing his weathered hands, who approaches her counter three times in the span of twice as many minutes with various questions about what _this_ cream does and is _this_ tone good for someone of such and such coloration, and would _this_ or _that_ glittery wallet vacuum be better, so on and so forth definitely loves his wife dearly but is probably wondering whether their marriage is starting to sour.

It’s probably unprofessional, definitely intrusive, but it passes the time.

Her watch reads but ten minutes from seven and her coworkers are already drawing down the heavy-duty metal shutters at the front of the store when her last customer, a tiny girl with her blonde hair cut into a short pageboy, a floofy pink dress that would’ve more properly belonged on a girl ten years her junior, and pink flats, steps up with a congenial, absent smile and places a small jar of moisturizing cream on her counter.  She adjusts the straps of a zebra-print leather purse on her shoulder, the leather scuffed and dull with wear, folds her hands in front of her, and freezes solid when she catches Juleka’s eye.  After half a beat she starts bouncing lightly on the balls of her feet, her smile widening slightly.

Juleka runs through the usual spiel—how are you today, you’re fine, all right, would you like to join our rewards program, sure, okay, here’s the form, phone number and email please, sign, thank you ma’am—before she rings up her purchase.

“Thank you,” Juleka says with grim, robotic determination, glancing down at her watch.  Eight minutes to seven.  “Have a good day.”

“What’s your name?” the girl asks.  Blurts, really.

Juleka blinks and looks at the girl, who stares back with her open, honest expression, baby blues wide and guileless.

“What’s your name?” the girl says again.

It takes her a blank second to respond.  “It’s Juleka,” Juleka says, resisting the urge to point sideways at her name, picked out in gold embroidery on her black uniform shirt, just atop her left breast.

“No, no, I mean your full name,” the girl says.

“Uh,” Juleka says after another blank second.  “Why?”

The girl offers her a half-hearted shrug.  “I like to get to know people,” she says, and thrusts out her hand. “Rose Lavillant.”

Juleka looks down at the proffered hand, then looks back up at Rose, calculating the odds that the girl is a serial killer looking to take her into her confidence.

“Couffaine,” Juleka says eventually, taking Rose’s hand and shaking it, once. “Juleka Couffaine.”

Rose’s smile widens a little further, and she bobs out what might’ve been a curtsy from someone with more gravitas.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mademoiselle Couffaine.  I hope you have a good evening.”

Juleka can’t help but stare a little as Rose trots off with her little jar of makeup rustling in her bag, her stocking-sheathed calves popping in and out of view beneath the hem of her dress as she scurries towards the front of the store.  Rose stops to greet the security guard—Kim? looks like Kim—who taps the bill of his cap with two fingers in a quick salute to her.  The two chat briefly before the guard motions towards the door.  Rose bursts out in a brief laugh that inexplicably brings the phrase “fly, my pretties, fly!” to mind before waving goodbye.  She disappears into the mall, darkening around her by degrees as shops shutter their fronts, lock their doors, and turn off their lights.

* * *

Rose reappears a week later.

Juleka hears the rhythmic _tap-tap_ of hard soles against linoleum, loud enough that it nearly drowns out the low, hopelessly out-of-tune (okay, she’s willing to admit that it’s a nice cheerful tune but it still sounds as though someone’s stomped repeatedly on a French horn) humming.  An accompanying quiet _thmp-thmp-thmp-thmp_ is probably the sound of a purse hitting someone’s side.

She straightens as Rose and her peacefully blank expression come into view. The slight girl’s expression flickers as their eyes meet, the humming cutting off with the suddenness of someone pulling a plug from a speaker.

They stay like that for the span of a couple heartbeats, the only sound between them the creaking of leather as Rose’s hand tightens on the straps of her bag and the random background roar of the mall.  Then the slight girl’s expression flashes on with halogen brightness, as suddenly as though someone had plugged a floodlamp into an outlet.

“Oh, hello, Mademoiselle Couffaine,” Rose says, bobbing slightly in lieu of a full curtsy.  Her smile widens.  “It’s been a while, how are you?”

Juleka blinks in the glare of her cheer.  “Uh, fine, thank you,” she says.  “How are you?”

Again the rapid flicker of expression, like spotting a handful of missing frames in a movie.  “I’m doing well,” Rose says cheerily.  “Very well, thank you!”

Juleka just stares.

“Is there something wrong?” Rose says after a minute.

“You’re very pink,” Juleka says without thinking.

Rose looks down at her outfit, twisting her hips from side to side to make the skirt flare out as it swishes back and forth.  Her smile widens another fraction as she looks back up at Juleka.  She cocks her head to the side.

“Do you like it?” Rose says.

“Uh.”

Juleka looks up and down Rose’s outfit.  Above a plain white undershirt sits a loose pink silk camisole, minimal but tasteful embroidery accenting the stitch lines, a pair of twining vines that climb up each side and border the hem, ending in a row of tiny golden sunburst flowers just above her breast in pale mimicry of her hair, framing her throat and collarbones.  A full skirt, also pink but of a dark, rich hue that for a fleeting moment almost reminds her of the heart of a living tree, falls to her knees.  A belt of walnut-brown leather cinches her skirt and camisole tightly around her waist.  Her purse, the striped black and white painfully stark against her outfit, completes the ensemble.  Rose-toned (of course) lipstick and a tad more blush than most women would employ complete the ensemble.

“I like pink,” Rose says defensively.

“I can see that,” Juleka says.  She casts around for another conversational topic as Rose smiles steadily up at her. “Uh, mind if I ask you the brand?”

“Oh, it’s not a brand,” Rose says.  “I commissioned it from a friend of mine.”

Rose’s smile creases with a passing thought.  “Although she’s looking for positions in the design industry and working on her MBA, so maybe this will be brand name soon.”

“Commissioned?”  Juleka takes a closer look at the blouse, noting the little irregularities in the stitching.  “From whom?”

“I think I have her card, actually,” Rose says.  She reaches into her purse and rummages, a slight frown of concentration passing over her face.  After a few seconds she pulls out a business card, its edges fuzzy with wear.  “Here you go!”

“Thanks,” Juleka says.  She glances at the card before shoving it into a pocket.  “Uh, is there anything else that I can help you with?”

A faint frown appears on Rose’s face like a flash of lightning across a cloud-cladded horizon, replaced so quickly by her smile that it leaves nothing but an afterimage etched across Juleka’s vision.

“No,” Rose says, drawing out the consonant, “actually, yes!  I’ve been trying to find a good eyeshadow for a while, y’know, one that doesn’t break the bank, still looks good, doesn’t run when I sweat, that sort of thing.”

Juleka blinks at Rose as her brain shifts gears.  “Sure, sure,” she says.  “All right, come here a sec?”

Rose leans in obediently as Juleka glances around her.  Right, coworker busy helping someone else, manager absent as per usual, and the security cams shouldn’t pick her voice up if she pitches it right.

“Contractually, Juleka says, “I am obliged to tell you that you should buy from us.”

“Oh?”

“Nothing we sell here is waterproof, and most of it is overpriced,” Juleka says. “Just Google ‘eyeshadow primer’.”

“Oh—“

“You did _not_ hear this from me,” Juleka says.  She raises her voice to her normal speaking tone as she catches movement at the corner of her eye.  “I’d check aisle three, bottom shelves.  Should have what you want there.  Use it myself.”

“Oh, really,” Rose says.  “I noticed that, it’s very nice, very good, your makeup I mean.”

“Thank you,” Juleka says.  “Is that all you need?”

Rose looks at her, blinking a little as she cocks her head to the side.

Then, she wilts.  Juleka would swear on her own left lung that she’d never seen it happen outside of a Miyazaki film, but Rose wilts, her hair losing a little bit of its volume, her smile a little of its sparkle, her skirt and camisole a little bit of their poof.

“Yes,” Rose says.  “Thank you very much, Mademoiselle.”

Juleka stares as Rose shuffles away and hangs a left.  She shrugs and goes on restocking only to be interrupted by a deep sigh.  She turns to see a grandmotherly woman shaking her head with a disapproving scowl.

“Hello there, may I help you, Madame?”

“I’m not the one who needs help,” the woman says, with a pointedly skyward glance. “Next time you go to church I suggest that you ask Him for a little bit of guidance.”

Something cold and sharp thuds into Juleka’s guts and embeds itself into her spine.

“For crying out loud, I knew that my Josephine was flirting with me about five seconds after she opened her mouth and she’s a wilting violet compared to your girl there,” the woman continues with a sniff.  “Been together near fifty years now.”

The cold vanishes so suddenly that Juleka is left reeling and thoroughly confused.

“I mean,” the old woman continues with querulous determination, “she’s not exactly what my type was back in the day but she’s easy enough on the eyes, and she’s nice too.  And perky, oooh trust me, the perky ones are always the keepers.  I mean, they do say kissin’ don’t last but oooh, let me tell you, other things do.”

The cold has been thoroughly replaced by seething heat flooding upwards through her chest and rampaging up to her cheeks, so intense that she swears she can feel her foundation start to singe.

“And of course she looks like the kind of girl who’s going to be open to new ideas if you know what I mean,” the old woman continues relentlessly.

“Madame!”

“Just saying, you need to be prepared for these things,” the old woman says.

“Madame, I assure you that I am not trying to—trying to,” Juleka says, searching for a phrase that won’t send her blush thermonuclear.

“Get in her pants?” the old woman suggests.

“Yes, thank you, get in her pants,” Juleka says.

“Mmhm,” the old woman says.  “And I’m Marie Antoinette.”  A wizened elbow jabs conspiratorially into Juleka’s ribs.  “I’m just saying, she’s going to be a repeat customer, just wait and see, your Auntie Maria is never wrong about these things.”

Juleka watches as the old woman—Maria, apparently—hobbles down the aisle and turns towards the exit.  She shakes her head and returns to slotting bottles and little jars of overpriced goo and mineral paste into their little wire shelves, the glass _klak_ ing in steady, mindless rhythm.

Okay, so Maria’s intuition is scarily on the mark about her, at least.  After all, let’s go over the facts.  She’s not wearing so much as a rainbow flag pin, and her attire is, well.  Black. Some tasteful purple accents here and there, whoever had designed the uniforms for this place had at least some conception of what the word “style” meant.  But still.  Black. Black hair, black shirt, black pants. Nothing about her screams lesbian, even though she (and two ex-girlfriends) have empirical evidence that she, ahem, bats for the other team.  And the lady had seen her for like what, a minute?  That was damn near Sherlockian.

She pauses and straightens, hearing her lower back crackle and pop with little twinges of sensation, feeling her muscles complain as they stretch back into position.

Okay, so maybe, if Maria’s intuition had been on the mark about her, it was possible that her intuition was also on the mark about Rose.  So maybe Rose really is into her.  And it’d been a while since she’d dated, and longer still since someone that cute had been into her.

She’ll wear the cherry lipstick tomorrow, then.  And the corset—okay, not the corset.

Just in case.

* * *

Rose drops by the next day, again towards the end of her shift.  Juleka spots her, always at the edge of her vision, flitting between aisles like a particularly pink and floofy butterfly, her skirts rustling as she scurries along. She keeps an eye on her as she bags her customer's purchases, her hands and mouth—"Thank you, ma'am, have a nice day"—moving with the surety of muscle memory.

And then, with five minutes to the hour, and seven o'clock and the promise of home, a shower, and bed beckoning, Rose appears.

"Hi there," she says with glassy brightness. She places a small tube of cream on Juleka's counter. "Just this, thank you!"

"Evening, Rose," Juleka says. Rose just smiles a little wider, her teeth gleaming.

Right, so she isn't noticing the new lipstick. So maybe she needs to give her a little bit of a push or something. Or maybe Maria was wrong about Rose, but she's going to give her the benefit of the doubt for a minute here.

"I like your lipstick," Juleka says. "Very nice, looks good on you."

Something flashes far back in Rose's baby blues. "Uh, thank you," Rose says, fumbling for words with the same smooth ease as a juggler might drop half a dozen chainsaws. "That's very kind of you to say. I, uh, like yours too. Very nice, it looks very good on you."

And there it was. Right there, if you looked past the faux pink of the blush that she'd employed so liberally, an actual flush spreading up from her neck into her hairline. In maybe a minute Rose's ears would be the same shade as her namesake.

Thank _you_ , Maria.

"Total comes out to twenty euros." Juleka says, slipping back into the mantra for a moment. She reaches out and accepts the rewards card and credit card that Rose fumbles from a zebra-patterned clutch at her hip, waits with a hand at the printer for the receipt, and hands all of it back.  “Have a good day.”

Juleka sees her stop by the door and greet Kim again—how _did_ they know each other—the two going into a sudden, hushed conversation.  Kim lets out a belly laugh and waves dismissively with a hand midway through; Rose scowls ferociously in response.

She shrugs.  Eh, none of her business.

* * *

“Hey, Juleka,” Kim says as she’s about to head out after her shift.

“Hey, Kim,” she responds.  “Mind if I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“You know that Rose girl?”

“The one that’s been hitting on you?  Yeah, why?”

“Where do you know her from?”

“Oh, she works at the gym I go to,” Kim says. He looks sideways at her and squints.

“What,” Juleka says with a roll of her eyes.

“You free tomorrow?”

“Half-shift.”

“Come by after your shift,” he says.   “It’s two streets south of here, next to the McDonald’s they just opened up.”

“You suck at directions, Kim,” Juleka says. “All right, all right.  Thanks.”

“See you tomorrow.”

“Later.”

* * *

“Yeah, no, I don’t have a membership, I’m just here to see a friend,” Juleka tries to explain.

“Mademoiselle, I’m sorry, but I can’t let you in unless you’ve got a membership,” the woman behind the counter tells her.  “If you give me a name I can get them for you.”

“Le Chien Kim?  Little taller than I am—“

“Oh, hey, Jules,” Kim says, jogging over to them. “Hey, Marissa, I can vouch for her, she’s not here to work out, just to see someone.”

“Kim—“

“Oh, come on, it’ll be fine,” Kim wheedles. “Just this once.”

“That’s five times it’s been just this once, Kim.”

Eventually they haggle it out, and Juleka is let in.

To see Rose get punched squarely in the face.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry,” a girl a little taller than her says, going over to her.  “Oh, crap, I’m sorry, are you all right?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine, I’m not bleeding,” Rose says, scrunching her nose up, “it’s fine, it just hurts like a motherfucker. I have _got_ to learn to keep my guard up, _ow_.”

“No, no, I shouldn’t have been going for the face shot,” the other girl says.

“Hey, Rose!” Kim hollers.  “Don’t you have a class to teach?”

“We’ve still got ten minutes, don’t we?” Rose says as she turns to face Kim.  She freezes solid as she sees Juleka by his side.

“Oh, hey, you’re right,” Kim says, glancing down at his watch, then up at a clock mounted on the wall.  “My bad.  See you in a few, then.”

“Hey there,” Juleka says as she walks up to the two of them.  “Sorry to bother you.”  The girl and Rose are dressed identically, in protective padded gear over plain, short-sleeved shirts and sweatpants.  Rose’s gear, of course, is pink.

The girl pulls off a bulky padded glove and trots up to Juleka.  “Hey there,” she says, offering her denuded hand.  “I’m Marinette, one of the instructors here, you here for the self-defense class?”

Juleka looks at the proffered hand, then up at Marinette, then back down at the hand.

“Wait, Marinette Dupain-Cheng?” she says weakly, taking her hand and shaking it.  “You’re the one who made Rose’s shirt?”

“Among other things,” Marinette says, smiling up at her.  “Oh, you’re Juleka, right?”

“Yeah,” Juleka says.

“Are you still good for your fitting this Saturday?”

“Yeah, I am, I’m not actually here about that, uh,” Juleka says.

“Oh, for the class, then?”

“Mostly just to see Rose, actually.”

Marinette’s eyes slide half-closed as she pans her gaze across Juleka from heels to head.  “Mm,” she says.  “Well, she has a class to teach for the next two hours, but you can stick around and watch until after if you like.  And if you want to join up, I think the gym’s doing a new membership deal, too.”

“That’d be nice,” Juleka says.  “Thank you.”

“While I have your attention, you mind if I pick your brain about your commission?” Marinette asks.  She starts walking towards a side room, Juleka trailing a step behind and to the side.

“Sure, no problem.”

Nine minutes of small talk go by as the room slowly fills with people—a stone-faced girl who can’t be more than sixteen who ties her shoulder-length hair back in a loose ponytail with an air of meditation, a stout and jovial Filipino woman with the beginnings of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes that can’t be older than forty, a couple dozen others everywhere in between in age and description and Kim, of course—before a young blond man a head taller than Marinette, his frame lean and lanky, trots up to them.

“Looks like everyone is here,” he says to Marinette. “You want me to get them warmed up?”

“Yeah, sure,” Marinette says.  “Hey, sorry about this, Juleka, but I need to get to work.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Juleka says.

“Talk to you later!”

Juleka finds someplace quiet and out of the way in the back and tries to be as unobtrusive as possible as the blond man leads them through twenty minutes of tortuous-looking stretches.  He steps aside as Rose, petite and fragile-looking beside him, comes up to the front of the room.

“All right,” she calls, placing her fists on her hips.  She pans her eyes across the room, looking through Juleka.  “W-We’re going to review through last week’s material on how to deal with a chokehold, and then we’re moving on to how to, uh, how to reverse that into a pin and how to adapt those techniques to a hair grab or if someone’s coming from behind you with a knife.  Adrien, if you could help me here—“

The lithe blond man—Adrien—slides up just behind Rose and snakes an arm across her throat.  Just as swiftly, Rose drops her weight, driving a palm up into the side of his elbow, slipping aside just as his arm begins to tighten before twisting aside and—her body obstructs her view for a second, but at the end of it, Adrien is on the ground with his arm pinned to the ground, his body following suit a moment later.

“And then flex their wrist like _this_ ,” Rose says.

She does something out of sight that elicits an overdramatic yelp and a loud “I give, I give!” from Adrien.

“So let’s go through that again,” Rose says. She helps Adrien to his feet and they repeat themselves more slowly, then a third and a fourth time.

“Now, obviously this works better the taller your attacker is,” Marinette says, stepping into the front of the room.  “But you’ll get used to it.  Two lines, please, line closest to me attacks first. Sets of four and switch.”

An hour and a half of controlled violence, mediated by Marinette and Adrien and Rose, happens.  Juleka gets just slightly more than none of it, but they move with obvious grace and a clear confidence and familiarity in what they’re doing.

“All right, all right,” Marinette says towards the end.

The class peters down into a panting, sweating silence.

“I know that a couple of you are just starting out with us and you’re wondering what the point of us going over something as simple as this is,” she says.  “Well, allow me to remind you that this is a self-defense class, and that the object isn’t to kick the other guy’s ass, although that is a pleasant bonus, it’s to get yourself out of the disadvantage you find yourself at as quickly as possible so you can run.  Rose, Adrien?”

With zero warning, Adrien lets out a shout and attacks with the wooden practice dagger that he’d been using earlier, whipping it from his belt and slashing it down towards Rose’s back.  Juleka tenses but Rose spins away from the slash and grabs him by the elbow and hand, using his forearm as leverage to rotate his shoulder through a horribly painful-looking arc.  Instead of driving him to the floor as she had several times before, though, she releases him with a quick shove, sending him sprawling to the ground.

Marinette jumps over Adrien in a long, flowing leap, hits the ground in a roll, and comes up behind Rose, driving a short jab into her side.  As Rose doubles over Marinette seizes her hair and drags her head back.  “Adrien!”

Adrien rolls smoothly to a knee and comes up aiming a vicious slash at Rose’s belly, but Rose reaches behind her, seizes hold of Marinette’s hand, and twists, sending Marinette stumbling into the path of the attack.  Adrien aborts the slash just in time to receive a kick to his knee that sends him to the ground again.  He’s up and swinging again a second later, but in that second Rose manages to loosen Marinette’s grip on her hair and drops her weight, twisting with all the power of her hips and back and shoulders.

Adrien is greeted with Marinette’s back flying squarely into him.  Rose stands above them, panting lightly, her skin sheened with a light sweat, and brushes a few stray bangs out of her face.

“Okay, so while that uses a few techniques we aren’t going to cover for maybe another month,” Marinette says.

“Ow, watch the elbow,” Adrien says breathlessly.

“Sorry,” Marinette says.  “But everything Rose just did is based on things that we’ve done today.”  She rolls off of Adrien and climbs awkwardly to her feet.  “Granted, we all have a few years of practice on you, but everyone needs to start somewhere.”

“All right, are there any announcements?” Adrien says as he gets to his feet.

Silence for the span of five or six seconds.

“All right, then.  Class dismissed!”

“H-Hey,” Rose says, coming up to Juleka, hanging a towel around her neck.

“Hey yourself,” Juleka says.  “That was a bit of a surprise, finding out that you and Marinette do this for a living.”

“Oh, well, I’m the only full-time instructor,” Rose says.  “Marinette and Adrien are both going to school right now.  And yeah, and I can kinda see where that, uh, could be a surprise.”

“You being a fighter.”

“Me being a self-defense instructor,” Rose says, with a hint of petulance.

“Hey, that little sparring match between you and Marinette didn’t look too self-defensey to me,” Juleka says with a smile.

“Well, yeah, I’ve been interested in MMA since I was ten,” she says.  “Marinette’s better than me, though.  Faster, thinks well on her feet.  A fight with her every once in a while keeps me on my toes.”

“Or breaks your nose.”

Rose looks confused for a heartbeat. “Oh.  You saw that, I guess.  Earlier.”

“Yeah.”

Juleka can feel the pressure of several sets of eyes on her.

“Yeah,” Rose says.  “Marinette’s good at those kind of out-of-nowhere tricks, she ducked under one of my punches and used my own arm to block my vision for half a second before she decked me.”

“Has she been doing this for longer?  The martial arts thing?”

“She’s got a year on me,” Rose says.  “That’s only part of it, though.  She’s got mass and reach on me, and she’s a little bit faster.”

“I’m really sorry, Rose, but you’re going to need to dumb it down for me.”

“Oh, sorry,” Rose says.  She mimes a quick jab with her left fist.  “Basically it means that she can hit me before I can hit her, and even if I can get in close enough to grapple, then she’s harder for me to take down than I am for her to take down.”

She lets out a quick belly laugh.  “It’s the same thing with Adrien.  He’s got ten kilos on all of us and more than a few centimeters, but he’s practically bottled lightning, fast as a panther, rawr!” Rose mimes a quick clawing motion.

“You seemed to handle him pretty easily,” Juleka says.

“Well, yeah, that’s the thing, he’s fast, but he telegraphs everything, and he’s got no precision at all.  He’s an open book in a fight, and clumsy on top of that.”

“Well, yeah, maybe compared to you guys.  It’s like comparing vipers and cobras to me.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Rose says.

“It was one,” Juleka says, smiling.

“Juleka?”

“Yeah?”

“Uh, would you like to have dinner sometime? With me?”

Juleka jumps as behind them someone utters a loud, heartfelt “Fucking _finally_ , I thought I was going to have to—“

“I would love to,” Juleka says.

“—fucking hell, dude, let them have their moment—“

“—dude, shush—“

“—knock it off, you’re spoiling the mood—“

“Could I have your number then?” Juleka says. “In case anything comes up.”

“Sure, sure,” Rose says.  “Only if you give me yours, though.”

The two of them exchange numbers, and Juleka tries to keep her smile to something that doesn’t look too creepily wide. Rose grins widely up at her, toothily.

“Well, I’ll see you then?” she says.

“See you then,” Juleka echoes.


	2. A Little Bit of Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The old ghosts of Rose's last relationship rear up; she and Juleka have to fight them off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [miraculousturtle](miraculousturtle.tumblr.com), [gigiree](gigiree.tumblr.com), [loosescrewslefty](loosescrewslefty.tumblr.com), and to [larvesta](larvesta.tumblr.com) for helping to make this story what it is.

“You are such a sap,” Kim says.

Rose blinks herself free of her reverie and looks over to where he’s leaning against a mirrored wall, arms folded across his chest, a wide grin across his face.

“Hm?  I’m sorry, what’d you say?” she says.

“You.  Are.  A.  Complete.  And utter,” Kim says, enunciating each word through his grin, “sap.  You realize you’ve been staring at nothing for the past three, four minutes, right?  Scootch over a bit, there’s plenty of space on that bench.”

She obliges and Kim flops down next to her.  “And this makes me a sap how?” Rose says as he picks up one of her discarded free weights and begins a set.

“Daydreaming about Juleka, right?” Kim says.  “Come on, admit it.”

“I was not,” Rose says, a little haughtily.  She gets up, places the weight she’d been using back in a nearby rack, and returns.  Kim eyes the weight—two-and-a-half kilos heavier than his.  “And it’s not like you don’t take every opportunity to gush about your new beau.  Stones and glass houses, Kim.”

“He has a name, you know,” Kim says with mock outrage.  “And yeah, but we’re still in, uh, crap.  Uh, whadda you call it, the, the, honeymoon stage.”

“Oh, I didn’t realize that you two had just gotten married.”

“Ah, whatever,” Kim says.  He flaps a hand dismissively.  “Phrase still works.”  He gets up, drops his own free weight back in the rack, and returns with a set five kilos heavier than Rose’s, pirouetting around a portly middle-aged man making his way towards the treadmills with a murmured “sorry”.

“How’d it go, by the way?” Rose asks.

“How’d what go—oh.  Our date?”  Kim eyes Rose as she finishes her set, goes to the rack, and returns with a pair of free weights five kilos heavier than his.

“Yeah, how’d it go?” Rose says, grunting a little as she hefts the weight up to her chin, the motion smooth, controlled, and only barely shaky.

“Eh, it went fine,” Kim says.  He pauses for a few seconds as he finishes his set and drops the weight.  Rose tries to suppress a grin of small triumph as he massages his arm and shoulder and mostly succeeds.

“Fine?” Rose says.  “Don’t sound incredibly enthused about that?”

Kim sighs.  “Look, I love Max to pieces,” he says, “but come on, Rose, museums just aren’t my thing.”

“So why don’t you just tell him that?” Rose asks.  She passes the weight to her other hand and begins a second set.

“What, you like kicking puppies too?”

“My day just isn’t complete until I send some poor chihuahua or toy poodle flying across the street,” Rose replies sweetly.

“Of course,” Kim says.  “The restaurant we went to after was the bomb, though, thanks for the rec.”

“Hey, least I could do,” Rose says.  She finishes her set and drops the weight to the mat, biceps burning pleasantly with the exertion.  “You’re fawning over him an awful lot.  You think he’s the one?”

Something flickers over Kim’s expression.  “Maybe?  Too soon to tell,” he says with a shrug.  “But I have a good feeling about him.”

Rose doesn’t respond for a couple seconds.

“Um, not to be a worrywart,” she says, her voice gentle, “but you had a good feeling about Alix, too.”

Kim gives her a sidelong look; Rose refuses to raise her gaze from a spot between her feet.

Kim sighs and runs a hand through his hair.  “Was it really necessary to bring her up?”

“Yes,” Rose says.  “Yes, it was.”

“The thing with Alix wasn’t, uh,” Kim says, “with her, exactly, it was just that her family decided to make a big deal about it.”

“But she still broke things off with you,” Rose says.

“Thanks for the reminder,” Kim says sourly.  “My point being that Alix wasn’t the problem, it was her douchecanoe dad.”

The space between them goes still.

“On that fantastically happy subject,” he says after a minute.  “You told her yet?”

“No,” Rose says.

“Should prolly do that soon, then,” Kim says.  “You don’t want another—“

“I know,” Rose says.  “Please don’t, Kim.”

Kim holds his hands up in a gesture of surrender.  “All right, all right,” he says, “all right.  Just—better to face it head-on, I think.  Before you two get too deep in.”

“I know,” Rose says with a sigh.  She looks up at him and gives him a wan smile.  “Thank you for caring, though.”

“What’re friends for?” he says.

Her smile brightens a fraction and she scoots over on the bench to give Kim a brief hug.

“Blech,” he says, returning the hug, “you’re all sweaty.”

“Uh, not to ruin the moment,” someone says, “but if you guys aren’t using those?”

Rose looks up at the speaker.  “Oh,” she says, “sorry, Pierre.”

“No, no,” Pierre says, stooping and picking up the free weights.  “Sorry to bother you guys.”

“No, it’s really no problem,” Rose says, “we were in your way, sorry about that.”

“Aaaanyways,” Kim says as Pierre pops in a pair of earbuds and starts on his routine, “I’m gonna go get in line for the rowers.  See you in a few?”

“Sure,” Rose says, waving him off.  “Don’t be late for class.”

Rose sits on the bench and breathes, trying to let the tension relax out of her muscles.

All it really does is give the dark thoughts that her talk with Kim had spurred plenty of time to bubble and stew.

Her last relationship had started as a faerie-tale and ended in the kind of multi-lane traffic accidents that shut down entire freeways and left no survivors.  Time, the care of her friends, and Juleka had dulled the dragging razor wire ache to something tolerable, but Kim’s well-intentioned prying now threatened to tear what stitches she’d managed to get into place completely out.

Rose sighs.  Rocks, hard places.  As much as she hates to admit it, Kim has a point; Juleka is going to need to know everything at some point.  Probably best if she hears it from her.

Then again, that had been her reasoning the last time too.

She shudders as the ghosts of old arguments, of lost sleep and days of just staring emptily at the walls and ceiling of her apartment, of the slow collapse of everything she’d built, her spotless academic record, her future, her friendships whittled down to a bare handful, everything, crowd around her and whisper dark nightmares into her ears.

It’d taken her two years to put the pieces back together after that.  If the same happened with Juleka it might be worse.

She can feel the possibility start to chew away at her, finding its old abandoned burrows, clearing out collapsed tunnels, snuggling back into familiar corners of its warren.  If Jules—wonderful, kind, sweet Jules—if even she ended up—

No.  Rose gets up, looks around, walks swiftly to a rack of weights, and starts slapping them onto a barbell with mechanical regularity.  No, no, no, no.  No.  She is not going to let herself be dragged into this death-spiral of a thought-process again.

Of course, she’d said that the last time too.  And the time before that.  And the time before that, staring up at her ceiling, under her covers, wondering if all this wonderful, overwhelming joy was just the lead-up to a swift punch to the kidneys.

She wriggles underneath the barbell, rests her palms firmly against the cool, textured metal, and heaves.  The bar considers resisting for a second and a half, but gives in.

Inhale, lower.  Lift with the exhale.  One.

She lets the familiar, pleasant burn course through her, scouring her mind of unwelcome thoughts.

Inhale, lower.  Lift with the exhale.  Two.

It was all fine.  They were all fine.

Inhale, lower.  Lift with the exhale.  Three.

She was fine.  She is fine, she’s completely fine with Juleka.

Inhale, lower.  Lift with the exhale.  Four.

But what if Juleka isn’t fine with her?

The barbell, colluding with her suddenly watery muscles and with assistance from the weights, ambushes her as she starts her fifth rep, cutting off her airway.

After a few seconds of mind-numbing terror laden with eternity—fuck her, she really should’ve waited until someone was free to spot her—Kim runs up and hauls up on one end.  Together they manage to get it off of her throat long enough for her to roll out from under it.  The instant she’s clear Kim drops to his knees, lowering the barbell to the padded gym floor with a grunt of effort.  He glances at the weights.

“A hundred kilos,” he says, somewhat incredulously.  “Rose, don’t you usually max at seventy or something?”

“Gotta start improving sometime,” Rose croaks, massaging her throat.

* * *

Juleka sighs and pinches herself, hard.

Okay, good.  She was awake, and this wasn’t capital-H double-hockey sticks Hell.  Although frankly, being roasted alive wouldn’t be as bad as this endless flipping monotony.  Probably.

She looks up at the clock on the far wall and wonders if she’d get in trouble if she hopped over the counter, seized the broom from the cupboard in the break room, and smashed the stupid, mocking, ticking thing to pieces.  It’d be a public service, honestly.

The door slides open with a whoosh; her eyes flick towards the woman silhouetted in the doorway, flick away to the clock and its steady countdown to the end of her damn shift, then flick back, a smile growing on her face as the woman, in a subdued, lace-trimmed, light pink sundress, comes into view.

“Hey, Rose,” Juleka says as her girlfriend walks up to her counter.  She leans in for a perfunctory kiss on the cheek, but stops as Rose draws back a fraction.  “How was your day, what’s up?”

“Oh,” Rose says vaguely, “uh, not bad.  Had a new guy come in and start harassing one of the yoga instructors and Adrien and I had to toss him out.”

“Heckuva lot more exciting than my day,” Juleka says, “I’ve mostly just been sitting here all day.”

“Slow day?”

“Very.”

“Hey, um, Juleka?”

“Yeah?”

“I actually wanted to talk to you about something.”

Juleka blinks.  “All right,” she says, “shoot.”

Rose opens and closes her mouth a few times; Juleka rolls her eyes at her.

“Come on, Rose, I won’t laugh,” Juleka cajoles.

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” Rose says.

“All right,” Juleka says quickly, holding up her hands, “all right.  Take as long as you need.”

“I, um,” Rose says after a minute, “wanted to talk to you about, um.  About, uh—”

“Yes?”

“—aboutswitchingmakeups,” Rose mumbles.  She flushes bright red.

“Uh,” Juleka says, “that’s it?”

“Yes,” Rose says.  “Yes, absolutely.”

“All right,” Juleka says.  “What are you going for, specifically, like, what kind of effect are you trying to go for?”

“Just something to cover up more,” Rose says, voice tinged with a hint of defeat that Juleka notices with all the acuity of a cave fish noticing a flashlight.

“Okay,” Juleka says.  She turns and starts plucking bottles from the shelves behind her.  “You might if I ask you a question?”

“Hm?”

“Why exactly are you making the switch?”  Juleka peers carefully at Rose’s features from a couple directions, turning her blush up a notch or two, before selecting a few bottles of greenish primer, placing them next to a small but growing conga line of tubes and jars of foundation.  “I thought you just used the bb cream.”

“Yeah, well,” Rose says.  She reaches up and scratches a cheek with a finger.  “You know about my complexion issues, right?”

“Rose, love,” Juleka says, “you know very well that I am intimately acquainted with your complexion.”

Rose blinks in the face of Juleka’s sudden feline smile, then gets it.  She tries to fight her flush down but only manages a token resistance as it burns up from blush, rockets right past rosy, and finally stops somewhere around marshmallow-roast incandescent.  Juleka giggles as Rose looks down, twisting a few strands of her hair in her fingers.

“Oh,” she says.  “Right.”

She coughs.  “Anyways, the redness is back and it’s starting to get really noticeable, and it doesn’t seem to be going away.  I figured that I’d get ahead of it before it gets unmanageable, get something to mask it.”

“I always thought that it was cute, actually,” Juleka says.  She flicks open one of the bottles with her thumb and squeezes a bead of greenish paste onto her index finger.  “Lean towards me real quick, please, need to see which one of these works best.”  Rose obliges and leans over the counter; Juleka carefully spreads the paste in a line across Rose’s cheek.  She studies the result for a moment, then shakes her head, wipes her hand clean on a cloth, and selects another bottle.  “Do you know what’s causing it?”

“No,” Rose says.  “I mean, it’s never itched or hurt or anything, so I always figured that it wasn’t anything to worry about.”

Juleka shrugs.  “You’re probably right,” she says, “but it can’t hurt to have it checked out.  You remember what my mom does, right—hold still please.”  She swipes another couple lines of makeup onto Rose’s cheek beside the first, examines the result, and wipes her hand on a cloth.  She plucks another jar of foundation out of the conga line and deftly unscrews the cap.

“Uh, she’s a doctor, right?” Rose says.  “Why?”

“Dermatologist.”

Rose puts two and two together.  “Oh, Jules, I can’t bother your mother.”

“Hold still, please.”  Juleka dabs some makeup onto Rose’s cheek.  “You wouldn’t be a bother, Rose, promise.”

“I’d be going in for a full examination, Jules,” Rose says.  “I don’t know what’s going on with me, I’ve never been to see a doctor about this, she’d need to run tests and everything.”

“Rose, it’ll be fine,” Juleka says, rolling her eyes.  “She’s been dying to meet you anyways.”

“Not exactly making me less nervous here, Jules.”

Juleka sighs and puts aside the jar she’d been holding.  “Rose, please,” she says, reaching out for Rose’s hands, folded between them on the counter.  Rose flinches away, then forces herself to release the humming, piano-wire tension in her shoulders.  Juleka hesitates, then sets her hands down a hair’s-breadth from Rose’s.

“Look, Jules,” Rose says.  “Thank you for going out of your way for me.  But it’s fine, really.  I’m not going to bother your mom.”

“All right,” Juleka says after a couple seconds.  “All right, if you insist.”

“Thank you,” Rose says.

For a second the air between them whines with unreleased tension.

“So,” Juleka says.  She slides a small stand mirror in front of Rose.  “I’d recommend this primer and foundation combination for your issue.”  She taps a finger to the tube and jar as she mentions them in turn, then gestures towards the mirror.  “See for yourself, it does a pretty good job of covering the redness up while enhancing your natural skin tone.”

Rose looks in the mirror, gives herself a cursory examination, and nods.  “Yeah, she says.  “Yeah, it does.  Thank you, Jules.”

Rose pays, collects her purchases, and leaves mutely.  Even the sound of her flats against the worn flooring of the mall is subdued, her posture and stance all calculated to minimize her profile.

Juleka frowns and rests her chin on the heel of her palm.

That can’t be Rose.  Rose is, if not smiling and loud and boisterously happy, as openly thorny as her namesake.  You might call her waspish at her worst.  When she’s upset she fights back, verbally if not with her fists, and elbows, and knees, and the occasional headbutt.

She doesn’t curl up and try not to be noticed.

Something—something obviously unpleasant—was going on with Rose.

For a second Juleka wavers between the well-intentioned, hellpath-paved need to pry and the sensible, logical urge to let Rose sort her issues out by herself.  It’d be rude to intrude on what is probably a very personal matter.  That was the sort of thing that people tended to get upset over.  Very, very upset.  Break-uppy levels of upset oh fuck it.

“I am really going to be doing this, aren’t I,” Juleka mutters.  “Crap.”

* * *

Juleka gets her first opportunity to be nosily helpful a couple weeks later.

It’s a by-now standard Friday evening for her—she finishes her shift, runs to her car before her manager catches sight of her and asks her to do just this one last thing for him—and drives to the gym to pick up Rose.

This week, she’s apparently a little early.  There’s no sign of Rose outside the gym, nor, after she manages to nab a spot in the bumper-to-bumper parking lot and makes her way inside, any sign of her in the front lobby.  Juleka turns slowly and catches sight of Marinette, texting someone in a relatively secluded corner of the lobby, half-concealed by decorative silk palms.

Marinette looks up as she hears Juleka’s footsteps, her expression brightening.

“Evening,” Juleka says.

“Hey, how’ve you been?” Marinette says.  She reaches up and embraces Juleka in a brief but warm hug.  “You look well.”

“You say that every time,” Juleka says.

“Well, you never know what might’ve happened,” Marinette says.  “Your cat might’ve been hit by a truck, the mall might’ve burned to the ground, you and Rose might’ve gotten into a huge fight, you never know.”

“We don’t even own a cat,” Juleka says, “and I think Rose is allergic to anything fuzzier than a naked mole rat anyways.”

“Well, we haven’t tried everything yet,” Marinette says with a shrug.

“On the subject of Rose,” Juleka says, and can practically feel the incipient and innocuous “do you know where she is?” intercepted and replaced by “do you know if she’s been acting weird lately?”

“Oh,” Marinette says, “she’s just showering and touching up her makeup wait what?”  She blinks at Juleka for a befuddled second.  “Wait, you didn’t just ask me where she was?”

“No.”  Oh, hell, she might as well commit.

Juleka takes a deep breath and explains, as best she can, Rose’s curious behavior.  It doesn’t take long, maybe a minute and a half, but each word feels as though it oozes out of her, treacle-thick and poisonous.  She forces them out nonetheless.

There’s a full ten seconds of silence after Juleka finishes with her gaze fixed on Marinette’s shoes.

“Hm.”

It’s less a coherent sound than it is an exhalation, a sign that the body that had made the noise was still alive, still functioning, still ticking over.  Just measuring things up, just thinking carefully about its next course of action.  Just considering.  Waiting.

Juleka looks up to be met with the castle wall of Marinette’s expression, bleak and unyielding and still.  Her eyes, though, her eyes are distant but alive with a burning-oil fire, with a silent, lethal fury that sucks the breath from Juleka’s lungs and makes her limbs watery with fear.

“Is that so,” Marinette says, each word deliberate.  Juleka finds herself leaning backwards slightly.

Marinette’s eyes refocus, losing some of their lethal rage, and her expression reanimates.  She runs a hand irritably through her hair.

“Sorry,” she says.  “Sorry, but this isn’t the sort of thing that you should be asking me.  It’s, uh, personal.  To her.”

“Oh,” Juleka says.  “I didn’t know, I’m sorry.”

Marinette gives her a patient look.  “Of course you didn’t know,” she says, “we aren’t telling you.  No offense, it’s just—“

The fires in her gaze sputter and burn a little lower.  It leaves her looking tired and drained, somehow smaller than her already-petite frame.

“What you need to understand is that Rose went through a very rough spot right before she met you,” Marinette says.  “She’s babbled at you about chemistry stuff at some point, right?”

Had she.  Esters and phenyls and terpenes, oh my, Juleka had more than once been witness to a Rose-nerdsplosion.  She nods.

“Rose was about three-fourths of the way through getting her degree,” Marinette says, “with honors.  And then she got dumped, and everything just fell apart.  Everything.  She dropped out, stopped eating, stopped leaving her place for weeks at a time, that sort of thing.  It took us a year to get her functional again—well, before she met you.”

Juleka swallows back the rising bile.  “One breakup did that?”

Marinette snorts.  “Well, it was Rose that broke,” she says bitterly.  “And from what you’re telling me it sounds like the patch job we did wasn’t good enough.”

Some of the fire boils back into Marinette’s gaze.  “I won’t see that happen to her again,” she says.

“I don’t ever want to,” Juleka says, her voice quiet.  “That sounds like a waking nightmare, what happened to her?”

Marinette shrugs, crossing her arms across her chest, her eyes flicking down to a point just behind Juleka’s knees.  “I told you,” she says, “she got dumped.  Hard.  You know what that’s like, don’t you?”

It’s not the entire story.  For a second Juleka considers pressing Marinette for the details, but then again, that stare—that look of tranquil, terrible rage on her features.  Her blood runs cold even at the memory of it.

“Juleka?” Marinette asks.

“Yeah?”

“Do you love Rose?”

“Yes,” Juleka says, her response instant, “of course.”

“That’s what they said the last time, too,” Marinette says.  She studies Juleka for a minute before she says, “Look, I like you, and I think that you’re a decent person, but I’ve thought the same way before.  And I’ve been wrong.”

More of the fire flares back into Marinette’s eyes.  “You say that you love her.  I’ll take you at your word.  But I’d think very carefully about how seriously you mean those words.”

She glances behind Juleka, and her expression morphs into a mask of overt, false friendliness.  “Adrien.  Took you long enough.  Come on.”

Juleka turns to meet Adrien’s own, bemused stare.  They both turn to watch Marinette stalk from the lobby, moving briskly towards the front doors, her every step clacking down onto the floor like a wrathful thunderbolt.  A man coming in nearly flattens himself against the wall to get out of her way as he notices her expression, and after she passes hurries towards the counter, trying desperately to hide in his own shadow, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze.

“Uh oh,” Adrien sighs.  “She’s pissed.”

“Understatement,” Juleka says.

“You say anything wrong?” Adrien says.

“Hey, I just asked her if she knew what was wrong with Rose,” Juleka says.

A flicker of old pain creases the lines of Adrien’s face.  “That’ll do it,” he says.  He sighs again, shakes his head, and trots after Marinette, waving goodbye to Juleka with a jangle of car keys.

Curiouser and curiouser.  Juleka sighs in frustration.  Asking people things was supposed to clear things up, not make matters murkier to the point of incomprehensibility.

She loiters for a minute more before Rose finally makes her way out, her face flushed, the skin of her bared arms reddened from her shower, her hair damp and hanging lank around her head.  She wears skinny jeans tucked into hard-worn leather boots and a loose white blouse that billows around her as she walks beneath an AC vent.  Her gym bag, straining at its seams with workout clothes and padded protective sparring gear, is slung carelessly over a shoulder as she scans the lobby.

“Oh,” Rose says as she catches sight of Juleka, her steps slowing.  “I’m sorry, did I keep you waiting long?”

Juleka forces the stew of unpleasant thoughts from her mind and slaps a smile onto her face.  Worry later, adore-slash-reassure girlfriend now.  She walks over to Rose, leans down, and kisses her on a cheek, tasting makeup on her lips as she straightens.

“Only a few minutes,” Juleka says.  “Marinette—“

Apparently thinks that I’m a serious threat to your well-being, like whoever your last girlfriend was.

“—kept me company.”  She smiles and puts an arm around Rose’s waist, feeling the tight bands of muscle there tense, and guides her gently to the front doors.  “So, how was your day?”

* * *

Her next opportunity to be nosy comes about a week later.

Kim finds her in the parking lot as he trots out to his car, a lone, pale figure below the steady illumination of one of the lamps dotting the asphalt.

“Stupid piece of garbage,” Juleka mutters, kicking one of her car’s tires.

“Hey, Juleka,” Kim says.  He raises a hand and smiles in as nonthreatening a manner as possible as Juleka whirls, hand dropping to her belt.  She squints at him, then relaxes as recognition dawns.

“Hey, Kim,” Juleka says.

“Your car broke down?”

“Battery’s dead,” Juleka says.  She looks hopefully at him.  “You wouldn’t happen to have a pair of jumper cables?”

“No, sorry, dude,” Kim says, scratching at the back of his neck.

“Shoot.”  Juleka fishes in a pocket for her phone, pulls it out, and taps out a quick text.

“You down if I stick around until Rose gets here?” Kim says.

Juleka’s eyes flicker up to him momentarily, and a smile works its way onto her face.  “I suppose that I could manage that sacrifice,” she says.

“Really,” Kim says.  “I’m honored.”

“As you should be,” Juleka says with a sniff.  “Anyways, how have you and Max been?”

“Uh, Kim?” Juleka says after a silent second.  She turns to him; Kim has a distant, pensive look on his face as he chews at his lip.

“Kim?” Juleka repeats.  “You all right?”

“Yeah,” he mutters.  His eyes refocus and he brings his gaze back down to his shoes, scuffing them against the asphalt.  “Hey, Jules, do you mind if I ask you something?”

“No, of course not.”

“You ever been in a relationship where you just knew that they were too good for you?”

“Oh, Kim,” Juleka groans.

“No, I’m serious,” Kim insists.  “Max is just—he’s so smart and accomplished and what am I?  I’m just some mall cop with in a dead-end job.”  He throws up his hands in frustration.  “Like, come on, dude.  Why’s he with someone like me?”

“Have you talked to him about it yet?” Juleka says.  “Asked him?  Brought it up at all?”

She waits for a beat; Kim looks uncomfortable.  “That’s a no, then,” she says.

“Look, it’s not like I want him to start thinking seriously about it,” Kim says.

“But I do think that the two of you need to bring it up at some point,” Juleka says, “especially if it’s bothering you this much.”

“Oh, right,” Kim says with a brittle, glassy brightness, “I’ll just walk up to him and tell him, ‘Oh, you’re completely selling yourself short by dating me.’”

“Maybe don’t put it in those terms,” Juleka says.  “But if it’s bothering you this much, then maybe you need to talk to him about it.”

Kim is quiet for a moment before he says, “Okay, fine.  Maybe you have a point there.  But—come on, Jules, how the heck am I supposed to start that convo with him?”

It’s Juleka’s turn to be quiet and pensive.

“I don’t know,” she says finally.

Kim brings both his hands up, then lets them slump back to his sides in a hopeless little gesture.  “Then I’m sorry, Jules, but I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

“Even if it hurts Max?” Juleka says.  “You said it yourself, he’s smart.  He’s going to notice if you start acting funny around him, and he’ll figure out that it’s about him.  Do you really want him to think that he’s done something wrong?”

Anger flickers far back in Kim’s eyes for a moment, but he fights it back before he says, very carefully, “No.  But he’ll be smart enough to figure that it’s not his fault.”

“Will he?” Juleka asks.  “When you give him zero evidence to the contrary?”  She sighs; Kim fixes his gaze on his feet, stuffing his hands into his pockets.

“Look,” Juleka says, “I’m sorry if I’m acting weird or being a little too pushy, it’s just that I’m worried about you guys ending up like Rose and I—“

Kim whips his head around to face her so suddenly that Juleka jumps.

“What did you say?” Kim demands.

“Uh, what—“

“About you and Rose, what did you say?”

“Just that I don’t want you and Max to end up like us,” Juleka says, bemused.

“Everything,” Kim says, his gaze intense and direct.  “Tell me.”

Juleka explains as best she can—the sudden, subtle, and increasing distance between her and Rose, and the lack of anything approaching a coherent, informative answer from anyone she’d spoken to, which was basically Marinette, it doesn’t take long—“and I don’t know why she’s acting like this or what’s going on and—“

She stops, growls, and throws up her hands in frustration.  “—I just want her to stop hurting and I don’t know how to do it.”

Kim stares at her.  Then he lets his hands come up to his face, slowly.

“Oh no,” he groans, the words muffled.  “Oh, no no no no.”

“What?”

Kim lets his hands fall back to his sides.  “Listen, I need you to answer something for me.”

“Okay,” Juleka says after a moment.  “What?”

“Have you, uh, mentioned anything about,” Kim says, “either of you dating dudes?”

After a few stunned seconds Juleka manages to find her voice.  “Why the heck,” she says, “would I talk about something like that with Rose.  Why would you even ask me something like that, Kim?”

“Look, I’m not saying anything about anybody,” Kim says, raising his hands defensively and backing a step away from her.  “I’m just saying that Rose has, uh, had some issues in the past that she might not have completely gotten over.”

“So what you’re telling me,” Juleka says, trying to keep her confusion and frustration from boiling over into anger, “is that all of this garbage is just because of some dude?  Because she dated some guy once?”

Kim winces.  “Uh,” he says, “sure, let’s, uh, put it that way.  Just, not in front of Rose, eh?”

Juleka takes a deep breath and forces herself to keep her voice level and her hands from clenching into fists.

“Why can’t any of you just be straight with me about this?  I just want to know what’s wrong with her, damn it.”

Kim manages to meet her watery gaze for a heartbeat before he looks away, gaze fixed on his feet.  “It’s, uh,” he says, “personal.”  He rubs the back of his neck.  “It’s not something that anyone but Rose should tell you about.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Juleka says, swiping irritably at her eyes.  “Yeah, I know, I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to apologize,” Kim sighs.  “Look, I really I really wish I could help you here, but—I can’t.  I just can’t.”

They lapse into a long, tense silence that lasts until Rose pulls up next to them twenty minutes later.

They say their goodbyes and part.

Juleka studies the road as the streetlights zip past in single file, muted sulfur-yellow or eye wateringly bright white or simply extinguished.

What had Kim and Marinette been going on about?  Something personal?  Something so private and sensitive to Rose’s life, her history that even the slightest hints of what it might be were verboten, that the details had to be hoarded as jealously as government secrets like she was some kind of spy?  What in blazes could that be?  It wasn’t as though Rose had done anything so horrible as to need that—sort of secrecy.  Rose couldn’t.

“So,” Rose says hesitantly, “h-how was your day?”

“Hm?” Juleka says vaguely, staring out the passenger-side window.  “Oh, fine, it was fine.”

“Good,” Rose says, “that’s, uh, good.”

But that didn’t make sense, Juleka thinks.  The stuff you kept the most secret, that you kept closest to the chest, was the stuff that was the most important, right?  So that was the stuff you told your partner about first right?  If they were really important to you, if they were really The One, that made sense, right, you told your partner things.  She told Rose everything, at least.  Or tried to.

“So I need to work tomorrow morning,” Rose says as she makes a turn into a roundabout, “but I can drop you off tomorrow morning and I can stop at the hardware store for some jumper cables, I’ll get you a pair too, for your car.”

“Thanks,” Juleka says.  “Sorry for the bother.”

“Oh no,” Rose says, her voice bright and sunny, “really, no, it’s not a problem.”

Juleka stares out at the streets as the passing buildings become progressively more familiar.

Of course, she thinks, that all leads to one unbearably, undeniably logical conclusion.  A leads to B, B leads to C, C for conclusion.  If Rose was keeping something from her, something important enough to completely change how Rose behaved towards her, then, well.

Maybe Rose didn’t care for her as she did for Rose.

That would explain the way Rose was less open these days, certainly.  It would explain why she refused to discuss even the most trivial of problems with her, why she insisted on handling that issue with her complexion by herself, why every conversation they had these days was more and more aggressively mundane and superficial.  She was cutting her ties, just waiting for the right moment to break things off.  Maybe she’d told the others, which would explain why they were so tight-lipped about it too, or maybe they’d convinced her of the necessity of breaking things off.  What did it matter?  The end result would be the same.

“Well, we’re here!” Rose says as she pulls up to Juleka’s apartment complex.  “See you tomorrow then?”

“Yeah,” Juleka mumbles, opening the door and stepping out.  She leans down and reaches back in for her purse, not looking at Rose, and turns and walks into her building.

Rose stays outside until Juleka has disappeared into her building’s main elevator, looking in and trying not to shatter.

She drives away as it starts to drizzle.

* * *

“Frnmphp,” Alya says, and nudges Nino in the side with a knee.

Nino sighs and fumbles for his glasses and his hearing aids.  “What was that?” he says to his half-asleep girlfriend.

“Door,” Alya grumbles, more coherently.  “Knock.”

“I’ll go see who it is,” Nino says.  He leans over and kisses Alya on the crown of her head before rolling out of bed.  He slips his feet into a pair of fuzzy purple-and-white striped slippers and trudges to their apartment’s front door, combing his hair back roughly with his fingers.  He squints through the peephole.

Rose, shivering slightly, her hair damp and flattened to her skull, her clothes soaked, drips onto the carpet.

Nino hurriedly removes the security chain, unbolts the door, and lets her in.  “Let me get you something warm to drink,” he says, shuffling quickly to the bathroom and returning with a towel, “chamomile fine?”

“Y-yeah,” Rose says.  “Thanks.”

“Get yourself dry,” Nino says.  “I’ll put the kettle on.”

Rose sits at the kitchen table and pats at her hair and clothes with the towel while Nino busies himself in the kitchen.  After a few minutes he comes out with a mug of hot water with a teabag floating in it and a small plastic squeeze bear of honey.  Rose accepts the mug and holds it close to her, breathing in the floral, sweet-smelling steam.

Nino sits down across from her and sets the bear next to him.

“All right,” he says after another little while.  “You all right?”

“And don’t mess around with me,” he adds as Rose opens her mouth to reply, “friends don’t visit friends at half past two in the morning soaked to the bone for no reason.”

“Well, your doorman was using the restroom and it was pouring,” Rose says after a second.  “And I forgot my umbrella.”

“Well, that explains why you’re soaked,” Nino says.  “But it still does not explain why you’re here this late.”

Rose takes a long slurp from her mug while Nino watches, patiently looking at her over his glasses.  It tastes of hot water, faintly bitter.

“You okay?” Nino asks quietly.

Rose slowly sets the mug down.  It clinks against the table with a rapid tink-ti-ti-tik-tink-tink.

“No,” she says.  “No, I don’t think I am.”

“Okay,” Nino says.  “Tell me?”

Rose does her best to explain through mounting tears.

“—and I don’t know if this is going to turn out like before, and I just can’t bring myself to talk to her about this because what happens if she just can’t accept me and I don’t think I could take it a second time and—“

Nino hands Rose another tissue.

“You haven’t told her?” Nino says.  Rose blows her nose and shakes her head.

“I can’t,” she says miserably.  “It’d be the same thing either way.”

“That’s true,” Nino says.  “But you’re going to need to tell her at some point, right?”

“I—can’t,” Rose repeats.  “Jules is just—she just—“

“No, no, it’s all right,” Nino says, pushing the tissue box across the table to her as she breaks out into fresh tears.  “I get you, she means the world to you, and you can’t stand the thought of losing her for any reason.”

Rose nods.

Nino sits and stares at his hands, folded before him on the table.

“Look, dude,” he says finally.  “I’m not a psychic.   I can’t read her mind and tell you if she’s secretly a dick, or look into the future and tell you if anything bad happens.”

Rose looks at him and dabs at her eyes.

“But from everything you’ve told me about her before I don’t think she’s that kind of person,” Nino says.  “I mean, yeah, obviously something is going on with her if she’s getting to be more distant, but maybe it’s not about you.  She’s mentioned anything going on with her work or anything?”

“No,” Rose sniffles.  “But what if it’s just—what if she’s just falling out of love with me?”

“Then I think that the two of you need to talk,” Nino says gently, “because I think that just sitting here and imagining everything bad that might be going on is just hurting you.  Might even push you away from her just out of self-defense.”

“Do you want to stay the night?” Nino adds after a beat.  “I can make up the couch for you, lemme just get some blankets and a pillow—“

“No, no, I don’t want to impose on you and Alya,” Rose says.  “More than I already have, I mean.  I’ll live long enough to make it back to my car.”

“At least let me make you another cup of tea, you look half frozen to death as it is,” Nino insists.

Rose looks ready to protest, but acquiesces.  She sits silently as Nino returns to the kitchen and fixes her another cup of floral hot water, sips at it politely until the mug is empty but for a thin wash of stray petals and bitter, gritty bits of—something—then collects her purse and her coat and gets up to leave.  Nino escorts her to the door.

“Hey, Rose, one last thing?” Nino says as Rose makes to step through the front door.

“Yes?” Rose says.  She doesn’t turn to face him but stays facing forwards, shoulders hunched in, head bowed.

“Look, I get that Juleka’s been distant,” Nino says, “and yeah, I know that it’s a huge risk for you here, and maybe more than a little unreasonable, but maybe have a little faith in her?  Trust that she cares about you?  I mean, come on, Rose, you know how Adrien and Marinette get when something’s on their minds, they just close up and try not to bother anyone and then it takes a couple weeks for Alya and me to get them to open up about it.  Maybe Juleka’s just like that.”

“Maybe,” Rose says.  She keeps her gaze fixed on Nino’s shoes.

“And maybe she’s not, yeah, I know,” Nino says, finishing the unspoken thought.  “And as good a bet as it seems you’re not going to put your continued health and well-being on the line.”

Rose says nothing.

“Look, just—“ Nino sighs and runs a hand through his hair “—Alya and I will be here for you if you need us, all right, Rose?  I promise.”

Rose sniffs, once, then reaches out and hugs Nino tightly.

“Thanks,” she says.

“No problem,” Nino says.  “Get home safe.”

“who’s it,” Alya mumbles as Nino slips back into bed beside her.  She instinctively rolls over and octopuses herself around him, hugging him tightly to her with every available limb.

“Who was it?” Nino says.

“’ys.”

“Rose.  Just needed to get warm, she got caught out in the storm.”

“oh.  ‘k.”

Alya goes back to sleep.

Nino stays awake for some time.

* * *

“No,” Adrien says flatly.  His normally open and cheery expression is set in a flat, neutral mask.

He slashes at the air with a hand as Juleka opens her mouth to protest.  “No, Juleka, I already know that you’ve been asking around, and I’m not going to reveal things that you, you know, being concerned for your girlfriend, should be asking her about.”

“And what if I just stumble head-first into a tender spot for her,” Juleka shoots back after a hurt, stunned moment, “because all of you decided that it wasn’t important enough for me to know about this.”

“It isn’t a matter of importance,” Adrien snaps, “it’s a matter of—“

“Yeah, yeah,” Juleka says, the words vicious and barbed, “it’s personal.  That seems to be a real big preoccupation with you, keeping it personal.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what she’d gone through,” Adrien says.

“Right, because I obviously know that,” Juleka says.  “Oh.  Wait.”

Adrien makes to retort but pauses as he notices the tears streaming down Juleka’s cheeks, almost steaming with the heat of her frustrated, impotent anger.

“Look, I’m sorry,” Adrien sighs, cooling.  “I get that you’re worried for Rose, and I get that you care for her a lot, but please understand, you really, really need to understand this.  The last time this happened, we thought the same way.  And then—well, certain things came out, and it turned out that we were completely wrong.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Juleka grumbles, wiping her face on her sleeve, “her life, her mental health, her school, her future down the drain, Marinette gave me the summary.”

“Then you get why we’re so careful about her,” Adrien says.

“—you think I’ll hurt her,” Juleka says.  “You son-of-a-bitch, you think I’ll hurt her.”

“I think there’s a possibility,” Adrien says.

“What the fuck,” Juleka says, “I’m her girlfriend, I love her!”

“And that’s what the last one said too,” Adrien says.  “So you’ll excuse me if I take that with a grain of salt.”

The sharp reply is screaming up Juleka’s throat when she chokes it off and pauses, remembering.

“Marinette,” she says, “Marinette said that too.  What are you guys talking about, what do you mean by that?”

Adrien gives her a weary, helpless little shrug.  “Not much to explain,” he says.  “Last person Rose dated said that they loved Rose.  Said it a lot.  We believed it.  But then it turned out that they were just words, and that they didn’t really mean them, or at least knew what it really meant.”

Juleka stares.

“You,” she says eventually, “think that I’ll just cut and run when I learn about—well, whatever this is.”

“We’re not ruling out the possibility,” Adrien says.  “Two years of trying to fix Rose will tend to do that.”

“Unbelievable,” Juleka says.  “Adrien, I’m a lesbian, it’s not like getting flak for something—personal—is something that I haven’t run into before.”

“I understand that,” Adrien says, his tone careful.  “But it’s really not my place to say anything, I mean, at least until Rose thinks that she’s ready for us to spill the beans.  I’m sorry, but that’s final.”

Juleka glares at him, her building fury beyond the ability of her words to express.

“Look,” Adrien says.  “Just please be patient with her.  Just trust that when the time is right and she’s ready she’ll tell you, all right?”

The reassurance does nothing to cool Juleka’s temper.  She turns on a heel and storms off.

* * *

“Rose, you need to talk to her.”

Rose looks up at Juleka with a bemused, wide-eyed expression, the very rosy-cheeked paragon of stubborn innocence.  “Talk to who?”

Juleka resists the urge to snap back that she knew exactly who they were talking about, they’d been arguing about it for a week now.  She manages to restrain it to a merely mildly tart, “My mother, Rose.”  And now Rose was going to reply with—

“I feel fine,” Rose says with a cheer that only serves to aggravate.  “There’s really no need to bug her about this.”

“You feel fine,” Juleka says, “but you might not be fine.  Better safe than sorry, Rose.”  And another dismissal in three, two, one—

“It’s just a rash,” Rose says, waving a hand airily.

“And if it isn’t?”

“And if it is?” Rose counters.

“Then my mother has to suffer through the utter horror of meeting you,” Juleka says.

“Come on, Rose,” she says before Rose has a chance to parry with an “I don’t want to put her to the trouble”.  “Whatever it is it’s getting more and more noticeable and we might as well address it now before it blows up into something unmanageable.”

“It’s fine,” Rose insists, “really, it is.”

“No it’s not,” Juleka says.  “Rose, please tell me the truth, how many layers are you putting on to cover it up?”

Rose doesn’t answer.  Her eyes dart to a point over Juleka’s shoulder.

“Rose, don’t think of it like a doctor’s appointment,” Juleka says.  “It’s my mother.  You’re my girlfriend, and you’re important to me and I want you to meet her.  Please?”

Rose bites her lip as she looks up at, then away from Juleka.

“Please, Rose?” Juleka says, more quietly.  “I know I might be a little naggy, but I just can’t help but think that this might be something more serious.”

Still no reply, for a long minute and a half.

Have faith, Nino had said.  Have faith that Jules still loved her, have faith that her distance and now this sudden anger was just Juleka’s worry, the fruit of a terrible seed.

Faith.

“All right,” Rose sighs finally.  “Is your mother free next Friday afternoon?”

* * *

“Hm.”

Juleka’s mother picks up her mug of steaming-hot milky tea, slurps from it, then places it back onto the coffee table that Rose has more than once thanked for being there between them.  She scribbles briefly in a notepad balanced across a thigh.

“Have you had a history of bad acne?” Dr. Couffaine asks.

“Yes,” Rose says.  “Uh, back when I was a teenager.”

“Hm.”  Dr. Couffaine makes a quick note.  “You have dry or sensitive skin or scaling?”

“Yes,” Rose says.

“Do you ever have a sensation of stinging or burning in the reddened areas?”

“Um, sometimes.  Not often.”

“Hm.”

Dr. Couffaine finishes writing down something, then goes back through her notes.  She flips back through a few pages, skimming over her notes and muttering to herself under her breath, her pen tapping out a gentle, tension-ratcheting rhythm as she goes.

Finally she tosses her pen to the coffee table.  It lands with a clatter, and Rose contrives to sit straighter on the plush, florally-patterned chair.

“You haven’t touched your tea, Rose,” Dr. Couffaine notes casually.  Her voice is level and almost completely uninflected, and tinged with just a smidge of professionally mandated interest.

Her gaze feels like acid.

“You probably have rosacea, or prerosacea at least,” Dr. Couffaine says.  “I’d need to run some tests and conduct a more thorough examination to be absolutely sure, but it’s a reasonable expectation.”

“Is, uh,” Rose says, “that bad?”

“It is a manageable condition,” Dr. Couffaine says, “but I’d like to emphasize that this is not a formal diagnosis.  You may have it, or you may just happen to blush easily and have sensitive skin.”  She digs around in a pocket and produces a business card, one corner folded over and the edges slightly foxed, and hands it to Rose.  “Call my office when you have a chance and set up an appointment with my secretary.”

“Thank you, Mademoiselle—“

“Oh, stop that,” Dr. Couffaine says, rolling her eyes at Rose.  “I’m not that old.  Call me Cerise.”

Rose flushes.  “Thank you, Cerise.”

“You’re welcome.”

Cerise smiles briefly but warmly and picks up her mug, holding it in both hands before her face, breathing in the steam.

“So Juleka tells me you studied chemistry,” Cerise says.

“Yes,” Rose says, “organic.  I wanted to go into the perfumes industry.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yes,” Rose says.  “I’ve been fascinated by scents and perfumes ever since I was a child, after Papa got me a book about how they used to make perfumes from—oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—“

Cerise cuts her off with a short bark of laughter.  “Don’t worry about it, Rose,” she says.  “It’s always nice to hear people talk about their passions.”

She settles back into her chair, the wood creaking under her weight, and sips at her tea.

“What are your feelings about my daughter?” Cerise asks, her tone far too light and mild for the whipcrack of a question.  She studies Rose over the rim of her mug.

“She’s the best thing to have happened to me in a long time,” Rose says.  She blushes up to her ears as her words catch up with her and adds reflexively, “well, she is.”

Cerise smiles wider and takes a sip from her mug.  ”You too, hm?” she says.  “Yes.  Juleka was the only good thing to come out of my second marriage.  Well, her and the alimony checks.”

Rose can’t stop the flicker of her eyes down to Cerise’s hands.

“Oh, no,” Cerise says, waving a hand dismissively.  “After I divorced his misogynistic ass I swore off men.  Too much trouble.”

As quickly as if a switch had been thrown Cerise’s expression goes from open and genial to its previous rock-solid neutrality.  “Of course,” she says, “I suspect that we are in agreement there, too.”

Cerise studies Rose in much the same way that wolves tended to study a wounded elk, her cool, steady gaze probing for weaknesses, for bleeding wounds that might yet be widened.  Then, after a minute, she breathes out a low curse.

“I was hoping I’d be wrong about that,” she says.

“No,” Rose says in instant rejoinder.  The blush flares incandescently, but she repeats herself more quietly.  “No.  It’s not like that—wasn’t like that.  Really, it wasn’t.”

Cerise allows one eyebrow to climb up her forehead, slowly.

Rose flushes proportionally redder, but pushes on.

“No, really,” she says, “he wasn’t like that.”

“Mm.”

“He wasn’t,” Rose insists.  “He was sweet and romantic, and, and understanding—“

Her litany stutters, falters, and fails in its infancy under the steady pressure of Cerise’s undivided attention.

“Well, he was,” she mumbles.  “Just, you know, not enough.”

She tries to ignore the hot prickle of tears as her vision blurs.

Cerise gets up, picks up a tissue box, and holds it out to Rose, squatting before her.

“Let me tell you a story, Rose?”

Rose nods.  She swipes a Kleenex from the box and dabs at her eyes.

“There once was a little girl,” Cerise says, her eyes taking on a distant, vacant quality.  “She was beautiful and brilliant and wonderful.  Sharpest wit in the country.  Unfortunately, she was also headstrong and stubborn, and she didn’t really have all that much common sense.  She thought that hormones were the same thing as real love, and she trusted in her judgment before anyone else’s.  So, she eloped with her boyfriend the month before she went to university.”

Rose pulls another tissue from the box and blows her nose.

“So surprise, surprise, her married life did not turn out to be an idyllic daydream.  The man she married did not like that his wife was a couple of orders of magnitude smarter than he was, although you could also talk about snails, clams, and some of the lower orders of flatworms in the same breath there.  He started to leave scars.  Not the kind that showed, and not the kind that healed easy.  And that beautiful, brilliant little girl started thinking that there was something wrong with her, something that must’ve made the man she’d loved so dearly hate her so much.  Even when there wasn’t.  Even when everything wrong was in his head, not hers.”

Rose blinks down at Cerise.  “Your first husband?” she says, her voice mostly steady.

Cerise comes back to the here and now.  “Huh?  Oh, sure.  I wouldn’t dignify him with the word myself, but if you want to call him that you could.  Anyways, we—“ she smiles, and distant fires burn in her eyes “—put him away.  Thirty-year sentence, and the stupid bastard obliged by failing his parole hearings.  Shame we had to frame him to do that but it was more or less the only way to get the gendarmes to handle someone like him back in the day.”

She flaps her hand in an “all right, moving along” gesture.  “My point being that it’s not you that’s the problem, no matter how broken anyone makes you feel.  And it’ll take time, and patience, and the love of a lot of people.  But you’ll understand that it’s true, some day.”

Rose wipes fresh tears from her eyes.

“Ah,” Cerise says after a second.  “But what if my daughter turns out to be as big a fool as her mother and still, uh, ‘lacks sufficient understanding’.”  She shakes her head.  “Well, I’d hope that I raised her to be better than that.  And if I didn’t then I promise that at least you’ll always have me.”

“I don’t know,” Rose says, “what I’d do if Juleka thinks less of me.”

“You persist,” Cerise says.  “All you can do, really—well, aside from take revenge.  Not incredibly comforting, I know, but that’s been my experience.”

Rose blows her nose.  “It’s comforting enough,” she says with a sniffle.  “Thank you.”

“It’s no problem,” Cerise says.  “Look, whatever it is, tell her when you think you’re ready.  That isn’t anything that I or anyone else should decide for you.  Okay?”

“Okay.”

Cerise’s expression shifts back into one of gleeful, mildly malicious amusement.  “Now, how about I get out the photo albums and show you some of Juleka’s more embarrassing baby pictures.”

* * *

“I’m back, Mom—“

Juleka pauses as she hears near-hysterical laughter filtering down from upstairs.

It takes her a second to put two and two together.  When she does, she sighs and drops her burden of clanking bottles onto the kitchen counter before trudging upstairs.

“So I get this phone call and the phone is all the way over next to the kitchen table,” Cerise is saying as Juleka walks up behind them and leans on the doorframe, arms crossed over her chest.  “I’m bathing Juleka in the sink and I’m all, ‘fine, whatever, it’s just a few long steps away, she’s not going to get into any trouble and I can keep an eye on her.’  I turn my back on her for thirty seconds while I’m answering the phone, and then I turn around and bam, she’s gone and there’s a trail of soapy footprints heading straight for the front door.”

“Really?” Rose giggles.  “I guess she didn’t like taking baths?”

“Hated them,” Cerise says.  “So anyways, in the span of maybe thirty seconds she manages to get out of the sink, cross the entire kitchen and living room, and make it out the front door before I notice what’s going on.”

“The story of when I got caught running naked down the street in broad daylight?” Juleka says.

“Yup,” Cerise says, while Rose breaks into a sudden, hacking coughing fit as she tries to look nonchalant.  “You bought everything, then?”

“Yes, Mom.”

“Excellent.  Margaritas, anyone?  Come on, Rose, I’ll finish the story downstairs.”

“Oh, dear,” Juleka says.  “Fair warning, Rose, she’s an affectionate drunk.”

“She seems the type,” Rose says.  “Hey, Jules?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for convincing me to see your mother.”

Juleka shrugs.  “Well, badgered, really.”

“Still.”  Rose leans up on tiptoe and kisses Juleka on the cheek.  “Thank you.”

“No problem.”

* * *

“So they’re pretty open people,” Rose says, tossing a quick sideways glance at Juleka in the passenger’s seat.  “Papa tends to be a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but he’s okay, just, uh, don’t get him talking about anything botanical, because he’s just going to keep going all through supper.”

“You’ve mentioned,” Juleka says.  “Four times now, I think?”

Rose gives a quick, darting, hummingbird laugh.  “I guess so.”  She nods at the landscaping surrounding a neat, squat Danish cottage as she pulls up to the curb.

A path of broad, rounded river stones, coated thickly with lichen and bordered by moss, winds its way across the property to the front doors.  A few streams branch out here and there, swooping out in gentle curves to encircle small plots before rejoining the main path, making little islands of carefully apportioned and tended greenery, trees and squat shrubs and flowerbeds and an occasional bridging arch of grapevines, their trellises just barely visible under what must’ve been years of growth.

Well, that’s what the garden might be in six months’ time, Juleka thinks.  Right now, in the middle of December and after nine days of unrelenting snow, with only one brief thaw last night?

The landscape is like every other place in the neighborhood: a white-mounded hillock where the house should be, surrounded by a field of more white, with the occasional skeletal tree or bush or collection of dead stems poking up from the endless white plain.  Some still bear a desultory collection of leaves—dead—in defiance of the weather.  The vine arches are frozen into solid sculptures, coated in centimeters of ice and snow, icicles turning them into gaping mouths with needle teeth.  The only thing unburied is the riverstone walkway, bordered by hip-deep walls of snow.

The garden is bleak, and the warmth of the light spilling from nearby windows and the rainbow cheer of multiple strings of Christmas lights and the jolly inflatable St. Nick sitting half-buried in a snowdrift does nothing to soften the edges or distract from the reality.

“Shall we go?” Rose says.

Juleka gives Rose a short nod of assent and pops open the door, shivering as the frozen air floods into the car.  She grabs her scarf and winds it around her neck as she steps out, her boots crunching into the snow, shoving the door closed behind her with a thigh; behind her, the purr of the car’s engine stops.  Rose slams the door shut and crunches up next to her, fumbling in a pocket for the key to the wrought-iron front gate.  She digs it out, unlocks it, and swings it open for Juleka.

“Thanks,” Juleka says, and steps through.  Her boot clomps onto one of the wide cobblestones, cracking through a thin layer of ice.

“Oh,” Rose says, frowning down.  “Emil must not’ve put out the salt.  Papa usually gets him to do it whenever it gets like this—or maybe the weather’s just this bad.”

“Your little brother, right?” Juleka says.

“Yeah,” Rose says.

“Salt?”  Juleka takes another careful step and skids only a little.  “Won’t that kill all the plants come spring?”

“Papa found a few years ago that’s environmentally friendly, apparently,” Rose says.  “And, well, it hasn’t killed his flowers yet.”

Juleka jerks her chin towards a patch of pink and green bordering the house.  “I’d be surprised if anything could kill those.  Are those actually blooming?”

“Huh?”  Rose follows Juleka’s gaze.  “Oh, those, yeah, Mama brought those from her home when she married Papa.  Her parents were planning on selling the family house and moving to Spain around that time, so she dug up one of them and brought it with her and planted it.  I think they’re called Christmas roses or something, Mama calls them something different.  But they bloom around now.”

“Mm.  Your mother’s from, uh, Denmark, right?  The Netherlands?”

Rose smiles.  “You just named two different countries, Jules.”

“Well, I nearly failed geography for a reason.”

A snowball sails in from the side, whiffs past just above Rose’s head, and pastes Juleka in the ear.  Her next step is, consequently, less well-balanced than it could have been and her foot slips out from under her as she sets it on the next slick, ice-covered stone.  She goes sideways and to her shock and displeasure finds that the snowdrift is in fact only a few centimeters of soft, fluffy, impact-breaking snow, the rest being hard, unyielding, painful ice.

Something cracks.

Juleka thinks that it’s probably her elbow.

* * *

Juleka watches Rose harangue her younger brother, Emil, for around twenty minutes before she finally says, “I think you can lay off of him now.”

Rose pauses in the middle of a “you-are-eighteen-and-you-had-better-start-acting-like-it-buster” and turns to her girlfriend.  “Jules, come on,” she says.  “You could’ve been seriously hurt.”

“I wasn’t,” Juleka says.  “He just missed you.”

“In more than one sense of the word,” Lily Lavillant says.  She peers carefully at Juleka’s elbow as she removes the cold compress.  “It doesn’t look as though there’s any swelling.  I think she’s fine.”

“Mama,” Rose says, “what he did was dumb and immature and irresponsible.”

“And we’re taking his allowance for the next six months, and he’s apologized,” Lily says.  “Profusely.  I don’t think yelling at him for much longer is really going to do much of anything.”

“It’ll make me feel better,” Rose grumbles.

“Aside from make you feel better,” Lily allows.

“Rose, really, I’m fine,” Juleka says.

Rose glares down at her brother before she sighs and says, “Oh, all right.”

“Now that that is settled, I suppose that we can get on with some more formal introductions now,” Lily says.  She offers her hand to Juleka, who shakes it gingerly.  “Lily.  I’m Rose’s mother.  You’ve met Emil, of course.”

“Hey,” Emil mumbles, waving a hand in half-hearted greeting.  “Sorry about hitting you.”

“It’s all right,” Juleka says.  “Nice to meet you, Emil.”

“And Jean is still out but he should be back within the hour,” Lily says.

“Why’s Papa out?” Rose asks.

“He burned the goose,” Lily says.

“Again?”

“Again.  So he’s picking up some Peking duck from that place down the street instead.”

“Goose is kinda old-fashioned, isn’t it?” Juleka says.  “For Christmas supper, I mean.”

“It is,” Rose says.  “But Papa’s family always had it when he was a kid, so he’s spent the last couple decades trying to recreate it.”

“He’s burned it twenty years in a row?” Juleka says.

“He’s only actually burned it maybe five times?” Rose says.

“The other fifteen it’s been—“ Emil sticks his finger in his mouth and makes a retching noise.

“Emil,” Rose hisses, “don’t be rude.”

“I keep telling him just to ask his mother if he wants it so badly, but there was that big fight they had when he married me and he’s refused to talk to them ever since,” Lily sighs.  “Oh well.”

Juleka blinks.  “Wait, what?”

“His parents did not approve of him marrying ‘some peasant girl from the boondocks’,” Lily says.  “And a foreigner on top of that.”

“That’s awful,” Juleka says.

Lily shrugs.  “It’s kind of you to say that, dear, but sometimes that’s just how it is.  At the end of the day, all you can do is put your trust in people, and if they fail to live up to that, then they fail to live up to it.  Such is life.”

Rose studiously refuses to so much as glance towards Juleka.  Juleka looks at Rose, quietly and steadily, over Lily’s shoulder.

“Anyways,” Lily says, “I’ll leave the three of you to entertain yourselves while I get the table set for supper.”

“Oh,” Rose says as all one hundred-fifty centimeters of Lily rises from her chair like a mountain from the sea, “let me help you—“

“I’m not an invalid yet, Rose,” Lily says as she trots off.  “Go on, make sure your girlfriend doesn’t die of boredom before your father gets back.”

Rose and Emil stare after their mother as she leaves the living room.  Emil glances back over his shoulder at Juleka, then looks at Rose, who looks back at him.  Rose looks at Juleka, who shrugs, then back at Emil.

“So, uh,” Emil says.  “You guys want to go play on my PS4?”

Rose looks at Juleka, who shrugs and says, “Sure.”

* * *

Supper, once Rose’s father Jean makes it back from the restaurant, is eggshell-pleasant.  The conversation is light and non-controversial; Juleka finds herself talking a lot about how Rose had talked her into applying to cosmetology school during the next application cycle and how she’s looking into career opportunities after that at the moment.

Then the doorbell rings.

The Lavillant family exchanges looks with one another in a silent game of rock-paper-scissors.

“All right,” Emil says, losing.  He gets to his feet, wipes his mouth with his napkin, and walks out of the dining room.  They hear him slide back the bolt and open the front door.

“It’s seven in the evening,” Jean wonders aloud as the low buzz of surprised conversation reaches them.  “Who on earth could that be?”

They hear the door clunk shut again, followed by the creak of the floor as Emil makes his way back.  He sticks his head into the room.  “Uh,” he says.  “Rose, it’s for you.”

The Lavillants exchange looks again.

“He’s outside,” Emil adds.

“I’ll go see who it is, shall I?” Rose says, as three-fourths of the table goes suddenly stone-faced.  She scoots her chair back as Emil takes his seat and walks quickly and purposefully to the front door.  Juleka hears it open, then shut.

* * *

“All right,” Rose says, her expression carefully blank, her voice trembling only slightly, and even then only from the cold.  She looks steadily up at the dark-skinned man before her.  “What do you have to say, Ali?”

Ali smiles at her, a little awkwardly, clearly forced.

“Not even a hello, Rose?” he says, affecting nonchalance but only getting as far as a sort of nervous titter.  “After all this time?”

Rose stares at him.  Ali’s smile falters and crumbles under the steady sandblast of her gaze.

“After all this time,” Rose echoes.  “It’s been what, two years now?  Since you left me?  Since you decided that I wasn’t enough for you?”

“Rose—“

She slashes at the air between them with her hand, cutting him off.  “No, Ali.  You said more than enough back then, it’s my turn now.  Do you even know how much it hurt me every single time you just casually denied who I was, every time you told me to my face that I was lying or just confused?  Do you know how badly it hurt to hear that from you, how wrong it felt for so long every time I so much as looked sideways at a pretty girl, how much it felt like you were taking a cheese grater to the very core of who I am every single time you dismissed me?”

“Have you any idea of how you broken you left me?”

Rose stands before Ali, trembling, her hands clenched into impotent fists.

“No,” Ali says.  He drops his gaze and stuffs his gloved hands in the pockets of his jacket.  “I mean, I knew some of it, from your Facebook, and some hearsay.  But not everything.”

Rose spreads her hands out wide.  “Well now you know,” she says, letting them fall back to her sides before crossing them across her chest.  “Is there anything else you wanted to say?  Because I’d like to get on with my life.”

“Your new girlfriend,” Ali says, “uh, you’re happy with her?”

“Yes,” Rose says.

His eyes flicker up and meet hers for a moment; he swallows.  “Ah,” he says.  “But not as much as you might be—“

“No thanks to you,” Rose says.

Ali winces.  “I deserved that,” he says.

“Yes,” Rose says.  “You did.  Are you going to leave now?”

“Not before I say what I came here to say.”

Rose gestures with a hand.  “Well?”

Ali takes a deep breath and says, “I’m sorry.”

Rose blinks.

“I fucked up,” he continues.  “I was a terrible person and a worse boyfriend, and I hurt you when I should’ve accepted you.  I ruined your life, and as a result I took two years from you that you’ll never get back and probably a lot more, too.  I’m not expecting forgiveness—”

“Good,” Rose says, “you’re not getting any.”

Ali manages to hide the wince a little better this time.  “I deserved that too,” he says.  “Anyways, that’s it.  I just wanted to apologize.  And to tell you that I’m willing to try to make up for what I did.”

Rose’s lips thin as she considers this.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” she finally says.

Ali coughs and shifts his weight from foot to foot.  “Yeah, I thought so,” he says.

“But,” Rose says.  “I’ll let you know if that changes.”

“Okay,” Ali says.  “Thank you.”

As Rose turns to go back into the house he adds, “Happy holidays, Rose.  I hope she gives you all the happiness I took from you.”

Rose almost pauses.

The door shuts behind her.

“Is everything all right, Rose?” Jean asks as Rose comes back and takes her seat.  Lily glowers at her plate as she spears a roasted potato and saws it into bite-sized pieces.

“Yes, Papa,” Rose says.

“Who was it?”

“No one important,” Rose says, glancing at Emil.

The five of them return to supper, the mood humming like a piano wire.  Rose shoots the occasional glance at Juleka, whose attention seems to be fully occupied by the piece of duck she’s deboning.

In the absence of conversation, Rose turns to reflection.

Ali’s visit had been a reminder that she had not needed, not when things with her and Juleka were finally starting to improve.  But now there was no avoiding it.  She can practically see the questions, writhing behind Juleka’s self-control, and sooner or later they would come free.

And that would be the end of it.

She looks up at Juleka and sees two futures.  One where she says nothing, and the questions keep writhing, and the urgent need to tell her boils over and poisons everything good and wonderful about their lives.  One where she tells her, and the blank void of uncertainty after.

She chooses.

“Well,” Lily says as they finish supper.  “I’ll brew up some coffee.  Emil, help your father clear the table.”

“Let me help,” Juleka says.

“Nonsense, you’re our guest—“

“Actually, could I talk to you for a second, Jules?” Rose says.  “We’ll be in my bedroom, Mama.”

She takes her gently by the arm and leads her away, up a flight of stairs, and down a short hallway to the left.  She opens a door and lets her in, then shuts the door behind them.

“Huh,” Juleka says, looking around at the neat little room, the walls, ceiling, and bedspread all a deep midnight blue, the ceiling liberally sprinkled with little glow-in-the-dark stars.  “I was expecting more pink.”

“That was when I was seven,” Rose says.  “We had it repainted a few years after.”

She gestures.  “Take a seat, please?”

Juleka glances around, sees the chair at the desk, pulls it out, and sits.  “All right,” Juleka says, watching her girlfriend fidget in place.  “What is it?”

“I haven’t been entirely straight with you,” Rose says, “about some things.”

“Okay,” Juleka says.

“You know the person who was here earlier?” Rose says.  “Well, he was my ex-boyfriend.  And he was my ex-boyfriend because he broke up with me, because there were some things about me that he couldn’t accept.”

She meets Juleka’s gaze.  “I’m not a lesbian, Jules, I’m bi.”

Juleka blinks.  She opens her mouth to speak, reconsiders, then shuts it.  Then she blinks again.

“Wait,” she says after a few tries.  “That’s it?  That’s the big secret everyone’s been so hush-hush about?  That’s what I’ve been losing my mind with worry over?”

“What do you mean everyone?” Rose says.

“I mean Marinette and Kim and Adrien,” Juleka says.  “They kept giving me all this cryptic bullshit about your—wait.  You thought—you all thought I was going to hate you because you were bi?”

She stares at Rose in hurt disbelief.  “What the hell, Rose, I’m not that kind of person.  How could you?  How could you think that of me?”

Rose looks away.  “I’m sorry.  But after the way things ended with him—I just couldn’t.  I was too scared to risk it and the longer we dated the worse the fear became, and at some point it just became easier to keep quiet and hope that things would somehow work out.”

“I do get it,” she says, after taking a steadying breath, “I should’ve come clean sooner, and I shouldn’t have let my fears about how you’d react come between us, and I’m sorry for that.”

“No,” Juleka says after a quiet minute, and Rose’s heart sinks.

“I should be the one apologizing here,” Juleka continues, and Rose’s heart soars from the abyss on wings of pure sunlight and then hovers a little awkwardly with guilt, “I should’ve just come to you when all this started instead of sneaking around behind your back.  I should just been more open about everything.”

“When all this started?” Rose says.  “What do you mean, Jules?”

“Oh, well,” Juleka says.  “You were just a little more distant than usual one day and I thought maybe you just had a bad day at work.  And then you kept being distant and things just kinda ballooned from there.”

Rose blinks.  “Oh,” she says, “really?”

* * *

The rest of the Lavillants sit at the table, sipping at their coffee.  Emil adds another couple spoonfuls of sugar and a dash more half-and-half, stirs, and takes another sip.

“Well, I don’t hear them fighting,” Jean says.  “Maybe she’s taking the news well.”

“Stop that, Jean,” Lily says.  “You’ll jinx it.”

Emil is about to add his own contribution when they hear the creak of weight on stairs.  The table silences.

Rose pokes her head into the dining room, then walks in, followed shortly by Juleka.

“The coffee’s a little strong, but I can water it down for you if you want, dear,” Lily says.

“Strong is fine, Madame Lavillant,” Juleka says, taking her seat next to Rose.  “Thank you.”

Lily pours them both a cup and slides the sugar bowl towards them.  Juleka adds a couple spoonfuls and adds a dash of half-and-half; Rose adds the rest of both.

“So,” Jean says, his tone the one of someone prodding at a bad bruise to see how much it hurt, “you two have a good talk?”

Rose and Juleka look at one another, then back at Jean.  Rose’s hand settles on Juleka’s on the table, who turns her hand so that their fingers lace together.

“Yeah,” Rose says, “we did.”

“You two all right?” Lily asks, in the same tone.

Rose and Juleka share another look and a hesitant smile.

“Yeah,” Juleka says.  “We are.”


End file.
